Now Germany's descision to shut down all of their nuclear powerplants looks even more idiot. After all, to make up for that lost power production capability they are building several GW worth of coal fired plants, or about 1 tenth of their total energy useage.
Fusion research proves promising, both the shoot it with a laser method and Iter's method, which focusses on way higher temperatures but incredibly low pressure, to such a point that while you would be standing in a reactor chamber where the temperature is several times greater than that in the core of the sun, it would only feel like a sunny day. (Untill you die of decompression/radiation of course).
ITER* should technically be capable of producing energy (I think the net gain was estimated to be between 100- 500 MW**) but they just didn't incorporate a generator yet.
*Which used to stand for Iternational Thermonuclear Experimental reactor, though that name got abandonned because of PR issues.
** Though that could also be the stats for the DEMO reactor, not sure.
The only evacuated them after the damage was done. The region around Fukushima was evacuated much earlier.
And thyroid cancer are usually non-lethal. And can be prevented by distributing iodine which I'm pretty sure the Japanese did and the Soviets did not.
I've read several books on this subject (although it was quite a few years ago) The soviets sent truckloads of iodine. Personally I thought the fact that the first responders had to make their own lead body armor.
But probably not soon enough. Also, the countries were the fallout landed (Ie Western Europe), were not warned. Then again, the region qround Chernobyl is rather habitable currently, though it is classified as a natural reserve. What proves a bigger problem is that the Concrete sarcofage in which they incased the reactor is not exactly in a good shape.